Space Schlongs

[thiosk]

Marin's game could be great! But an XCom game?

Maybe, XCom: Alternate Universe or something like that.

I ran through the demo, and enjoyed it. I'll buy it. I'm not sure if I'll put in 1/10 the time thats gone into the original over the years, but I'll play it for sure.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

XCOM's shooter got canceled? Thats a shame, it looked freaky, in a good way. Might give the 'new' one a go though, not enough good stratergy games out at the mo.

I don't believe it's been officially canceled, it's just been dark and possibly in a bit of developmental hell. Some screenshots cropped up earlier this week to suggest the game is still alive and kicking, but it's seemingly gone through some massive changes. - http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/119889-Major-Changes-Rumored-for-XCom-Shooter

Hrrmmm, I hope it gets a chance, I LOVED Fallout 3 and the idea of it getting wiped from history because Fallouts vets got their knickers in a twist makes me mad. I understand, theres not alot of... whatever the hell the original Fallouts were classed as and its a shame there fans didn't get what they wanted, but now Fallouts popular again (sort of) maybe we'll get some more interesting editions to the francise... maybe... proberly not...

People were bitching that the Xcom FPS appeared to be a Syndicate style reboot, the type that's Xcom in name only rather than a Fallout style change of perspective.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

Im kinda upset that 2K is changing the XCOM FPS into a tactical TPS. Just reeks of compromise. And its basically worthless too, as the people complaining were never going to buy it to began with. Should have just kept it as it was...

...to be clear, I most likely wasnt even going to bother with it anyways...

Apparently the two projects were running simultaneously for a couple of years with work on Enemy Unknown starting in 2008, two years before the FPS's less than stellar reveal.

 

[iblis666]

all i got from this was jealousy over not having prehensile junk

 

[Burst6]

Fallout 3 and Metroid Prime were good games and didn't deserve the pre-emptive hate they got.
They didn't deserve it because they didn't deviate (much) from what made the original games great. Fallout 3 is still an RPG, and Metroid Prime is still... well, a metroid game where you do metroidy stuff. The change was a change of perspective with tweaks to the gameplay to compliment that.

Games like Syndicate, however, are a completely different thing. Nothing of what made the original games great is in the reboot. In fact, very little of the original games are in the reboot at all. It's just another FPS game with the Synticate name slapped on. Unlike Fallout 3 and Metroid Prime, that were actually carried on their respective franchises, Syndicate threw it away.

I have to agree on this. When you turn a previously 2D isometric game in a 3D experience where the world feels built and solid instead of drawn on a canvas there's only to be gained from that: I would sacrifice newborns for a remake of Syndicate like Fallout 3 was to Fallout 2.

The problem isn't the 3D or the FPS perspective: Fallout 3 was still a roleplaying game full of NPC interactions, a wacky world built on the ruins of a pseudo 50s society demolished by an unspecified nuclear war that happened in the past and you'll never get to see, and it's also an affectionate parody of the cold war and with a huge number of references thrown here and there.

Metroid Prime still had all the exploration and backtracking that has always been a staple of the series, along with a Samus Aran that was not a sterotypical whiny submissive female, an objective achieved by simply not making her talk and letting the player immerse within the character rather than force-feeding him a foul-smelling slob of rotting pus they had the gall to call "personality".

The FPS X-Com didn't look like an utter piece of garbage from the get-go to me because it was an FPS, but because all it showed me were boring hollywood movie antics with aliens thrown right in your face but that don't seem to have any rhyme nor reason. And chest high walls everywhere. I know I wasn't supposed to expect seeing the same aliens I've known to both fear and love in the previous iterations of the series, but if you want me to become fond of a new set of bad guys you have to GIVE ME a new set of badguys, not anonymous, amorphous black blobs to be fought from behind chest high walls.

If you want to make an FPS based on X-Com you should at least make some effort to give the game a modicum of connection or resemblance with the IP you're trying to wrench money out of. Slapping the name on the cover and hoping that nostalgia will get people to buy a game that has nothing to do with what was advertised is tantamount to fraud.

I'm with you two on this. Metroid was basically a transition from a 2d platformer action game into a 3d platformer action game, and fallout went from a exploration based classic RPG into an exploration based action RPG. Yes, action RPG. It's pretty identical to oblivion mechanically and we don't call that an FPS.


Turning a RTS into an FPS is pretty much jumping from one side of the genre spectrum to the other.

 

[BehattedWanderer]

I want to say that mentioning Fallout 3 and Metroid Prime as examples of when it was pulled off exquisitely doesn't mean that any game can, that both of those could fairly easily be done from the first person perspective without changing what the game is and how XCOM doesn't have that kind of crutch, but I'm not going to, because I feel like that would just belabor the point that not every studio can pull that off, and that those that try and convert a non-FPS property to FPS just to get on the popular trend have missed the point of both FPSs and their non-FPS game. In not saying that, I'll also not say that Extra Credits had a discussion awhile back (forget which one specifically) where they talked about the other mechanics in a game, and why the other mechanics don't make us think of "FPS" when we think Fallout 3, and how we instead think "RPG in first person". It's things like that that I'm not going to mention.

 

[Icehearted]

Maybe they had no fruit of knowledge, no fig leaves, no reason to hide their shame. maybe they're a nudist planet (imagine that kind of Asari home world... nude blue starfish-headed women with engorged reproductive tendrils slithering about...). Tis a funny thing to worry about, since it's an alien invasion.

just gonna warn you, your probably going to get flamed all to hell for supporting the FPS "XCOM".

This will largely be because the FPS has nothing to do with XCOM, and just took the name in a misguided attempt to appeal to nostalgia.

Sorta like that game that did the same thing and sold poorly.... what was it called... oh yeah...

Spoiler: Fallout 3

(I know it sold well, that's the joke).

Edit (because I'm slow today):

I want to say that mentioning Fallout 3 and Metroid Prime as examples of when it was pulled off exquisitely doesn't mean that any game can, that both of those could fairly easily be done from the first person perspective without changing what the game is and how XCOM doesn't have that kind of crutch.

Metroid is an odd example, since the game was always action oriented and ultimately not really a shooter (as even the studio that developed it admitted around Prime's release). Like X-Com, Fallout was a turn-based game; they changed what the game is. For those of us that grew up playing the old Fallout titles what we got was a mangled and unrecognizable experience. I'm not saying it was bad, but I am saying it wasn't Fallout. To have simply titled it as a spinoff would have settled an awful lot of debates, but ultimately they changed the formula, the writing, the mechanics were annihilated, the core game play discarded, the game was only thematically Fallout.

I get what you mean about not everyone pulling it off, but a lot of series fans from the past felt the same way, and while what we got wasn't Fallout, it wasn't bad either. Also I feel this get's into the meat of your point, how the point of the games (their soul and flavor if you will) are lost. I can't say Fallout ever felt like a RPG to me, it simply lacked enough of the right elements to make it any better than a shooter with stat adjustments. Making their weapons less accurate and adding stats to improve their accuracy doesn't add to anything that makes it any more substantive as a role-player than Call of Duty.

I won't drag you into this sort of debate because I understand why you didn't seem to want to flesh out this part of the discussion, but I must disagree with you if you believe that Fallout didn't lose what it was when it went 3D. New Vegas can almost be construed as an admission they gutted too much from the series, and it did a poor job of restoring what was lost.

 

[Darth_Payn]

So, is the new XCOM gonna be FPS or not? And you guys keep bringing up the Syndicate reboot and its suckage, which I think was made just to compete with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which was a prequel that stuck to its series' format pretty well.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

So why not make both? Since costs 1/3rd or so the other it should not be so hard to do and you can use the same assets/base/code,ect,ect. I like my shooters and RTS games but what I hate the most is easy over simplistic game designs.

 

[theultimateend]

just gonna warn you, your probably going to get flamed all to hell for supporting the FPS "XCOM".

This will largely be because the FPS has nothing to do with XCOM, and just took the name in a misguided attempt to appeal to nostalgia.

Honestly the only reason I was upset was it felt like they were making an FPS instead of the thing folks kept asking for.

Had they announced both I'd have been 100% gravy.

"Interesting a FPS AND the game I want! Cool!"

 

[Nerdstar]

i think ill just leave this here for now...

 

[Irridium]

Can't say I care that the XCOM FPS is doing bad. Frankly, we have enough shooters. Sucks for the people who were interested in it, but I'm glad we got this instead of another FPS game.

 

[octafish]

I honestly thought that the X-Com shooter looked terrible. Nice aesthetic but uninspired gameplay....the biggest mistake was having a protagonist, characters have to be disposable in an X-Com game because they WILL die. A protagonist ruins that because if they die it throws a failure state that requires a replay of a level rather than limping on undermanned, which to me is a key part of X-Com. All they needed to do was have a roster system similar to Rainbow Six and it could have been fine, but gamers need to have a white brown haired bland protaganist to follow or they get confused.

 

[endplanets]

"I guess what worries me about the whole affair is that the fan "outcry" has actually done something."

Really now, that was an impressive fan cry. Because in an interview they said they had been working on the turn-based game since 2008.
Though I do like to think that the outcry hurt the FPS one.

 

[imperfect number]

Just to be clear. When people say the XCOM reboot NOW they typically mean the TBS game that comes out next week, which while opinions on it may be mixed there are clear connections to the original game.

The FPS XCOM pissed a lot of people of because A) fans had been asking for a TBS update for years, then we get an reboot that is an FPS which is totally different from what we had be asking and hoping for and B)There was no connection to the original beyond 'aliens invade'.

Now yes, the idea of a Alien Invasion FPS set in the 50s might be neat. But if you are going to call it X-COM, especially when fans had been asking for a faithful reboot for almost a decade, then you need to have at least some connection to the original game.

@ Endplanets, while fan anger at the FPS might not have gotten the turn-based game started, fans had been asking for turn-based reboot a decade.

 

[jezcentral]

Would it be too pedantic to point out that the naked sectoidd were clones and we were specifically told they had no space junk? Almost all the other alien races had clothes, or were robots.